Reactions to Netvibe & Rojo

I like many of the features of Rojo. It seems to integrate several features of RSS including the ability to subscribe to feeds, to search feeds and access their feeds directory (of sorts). I especially like the option that the user has to tag the feeds and to organize them through the Rogo sort option. The front page provides ideas for feeds (on the side bar) relating to various topics (i.e. Food, Gadgets, Web 2.0). I also appreciated the fact that in the Rojo search, you can specify whether the search should be for feeds of blogs and news OR for feeds on your topic in general. An quasi-advanced search one might say. Finally, I liked the Feed Discovery Wizard. Like other aggregator options, it allows the user to pick from feeds divided by subject; however I liked that it would recommend feeds based on the user’s postal code. Cool…add a little local flavour to one’s RSS experience.

Netvibe seems to be one of these services that allows you to completely customize the way you interact with the web. I’ve often heard about these types of applications but never explored them for myself. Is it like MyYahoo or Google Homepage? I can see the benefit for someone who spends large amounts of time on the web (am I becoming one of these junkies?). It’s nice that you can add your own tabs for personal organization of Internet interests. It would be nice to be able to organize RSS feeds in this manner as well (Netvibes seems to make this possible). I also like the way the search option defaults to providing various searching alternatives (Google, Wikipedia etc). If I had a lot of extra time on my hands to play around, I could really get into playing around with the customization of my own personal Internet space. But alas, there are assignments to write, classes to attend and blogs to respond to. In starting out with either Rojo or Netvibes, I think sifting through all of their "recommended" feeds would be an annoying task. I think I'd rather start from scratch.

I began using RSS a few months ago when I started working at a special library in Regina for co-op. Most of the sites that I visited at that time did not offer RSS feeds, and so I signed up really just to get a first-hand experience rather than out of a need for the service. Throughout the term I was notified by my colleagues of various blogs that were relevant to our library work, and so they eventually found a prominent place in my bloglines account. I have been quite satisfied with Bloglines until this point, but now that I see some of the alternatives that are available, I may have to think about what I want from an aggregator. I kind of like the idea of a web “one-stop shop” like Netvibes, where all my Internet activity (searching, email, blogging) can be amalgamated into one site.